Last week a package arrived for me full of minis goodness. Ignoring the Spike! Journal, White Dwarfs (White Dwarves) and Shadespire stuff (not completely though, it’s a great game you should try out) you’ll notice Glorfindel and a box of Knights of Rivendell. Finally I have all the parts I need for all the options of a high elves force for Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game. Now I just need to put it all together (and paint it) but it has me rethinking my plans a little.

When I last made conversion plans, I was debating how best to do mounted Gil-galad, Glorfindel and Lindir as well as how to do a Lindir on foot in armor. I posted some photoshopped pics of options I was considering and what not. Since then I’ve started some work on this project.

First I made the decision to go ahead and use the mounted twins as the bases for my Gil-galad and Glorfindel mounted conversions. I got a Gil-galad with broken spear off one of the trade groups and started cutting things up. As you can see, he’s still just tacked together with blue tac, but I think in the end it will look quite nice. Well, as nice as it can as I feel the sculpt of Gil-galad’s face is not the best in the product line. I bought a bit of brass rod for his spear and some small strips of plastic card that I will try to use for the barding on his armored horse. I haven’t seen that attempted before, but if it doesn’t work I’ll resort to using green stuff.

Similarly, Glorfindel will receive a simple head swap and an arm repositioning on the other mounted twin. Now my question is do I cut up the shiny, brand new model or the painted one I got off an ebay lot? The painted model looks quite nice and is on a nice, elevated base. Glorfindel is painted in a gold armor scheme while my warriors are a dark bronze. Which is fine, Glorfindel’s armor is Armor of Gondolin that gives him resistance to magic, my plan has always been for his armor to be painted differently to represent this. My concern is, the mounted version that I paint won’t look exactly the same, due to being a different painters touch, different paints used, etc. I could always paint my mounted version and if it doesn’t look close enough and I’m not cool with that, strip the painted one. Or I could go ahead and strip the painted one now and use that head for the conversion, technically he’s already damaged goods as he was missing his sword which I replaced with a plastic one. Also, another idea I had for his Armor of Gondolin was to use one of those nifty color-shifting paints by Green Stuff World. But maybe that would be a bit over the top in the more grounded fantasy world that is Middle-earth?

Lindir is the next conundrum. I got one of the Battle Games in Middle-earth conversion sprues a while back and put together this conversion out of a headless standard bearer I had. I think it’s a nice looking figure, but if I use the captain from the Rivendell Knights to represent Lindir on horse, the head won’t look the same. Fortunately the kit comes with two captain heads and I have an extra captain/knight I got off someone on the trade group. Maybe I swap the conversion sprue head out for the Rivendell Knight captain head? Do I even really need an armored Lindir on foot or do I just use the Lindir model I already own?

Or do I put the Rivendell Knight captain head on the soon-to-be headless Glorfindel body and call that Lindir in armor and leave the model above alone for my Battle Companies leader? Or I’ve had thoughts of giving the Glorfindel model a spear and shield as a Battle Companies hero. Well there are lots of options I could do with various minis and I won’t trouble you with them all right now.

What happened to the banner from the headless standard bearer you ask? Well it so happened that I had a spear elf missing a spear, so now he’s got a banner and shield which is a nice option.

If you’ve got an comments or suggestions, feel free to post them. I’d love to hear some feedback.